Huh? I thought it was just another of those cornball all-American ads that pop up every so often; dripping with the po-faced sentimentality that seems strangely at odds with — and yet emphatically underpins — America’s preferred self-image, that of a thrusting economic and military superpower. It had all the usual stock-footage clichés — sunrises, smokestacks, meaningful stares, heroic firemen, Old Glory — with lines delivered by a tough-guy screen icon who sounded like he’d just single handedly liberated Iwo Jima. As these things go, it wasn’t a bad ad. It’s just that last year’s edgy, defiant “Imported from Detroit” was so much cleverer.

Karl Rove’s rhetoric is a cynical piece of political calculus carefully designed to exploit the simmering disquiet many Americans still feel about bailing out GM and Chrysler. Cynical? Well, if rescuing Detroit carmakers was such a bad idea, why didn’t Rove pressure President Bush to let GM and Chrysler go under in 2008 when he had the opportunity? Or did he decide it might be more politically expedient for Bush to give them both short-term, taxpayer-funded loans to keep them on life support, and let the incoming Obama Administration make the tough decisions and take the heat?

No matter which party controlled Washington in early 2009, GM and Chrysler would have been bailed out. The consequences of not doing so were simply too terrifying to contemplate for an economy that had already been reduced to rubble by the amoral antics of Wall Street. It was the right thing to do for the good of the country. The Democrats knew it. The Republicans knew it. So we bailed ‘em out. And it’s about time we got over it.

Bailing out GM and Chrysler should no longer be a hot-button political issue. After all, we seem remarkably relaxed about the trillions of taxpayer dollars we’ve handed over to bailout huge for-profit financial companies that were clearly no better managed. It doesn’t even make sense to argue that spending taxpayer dollars to subsidize or prop-up private companies is somehow un-American: American taxpayers have been subsidizing American farmers and agri-businesses to the tune of billions of dollars a year for decades. Hell, even America’s oil companies suckle on the taxpayer’s teat, pocketing roughly $4 billion a year in government subsidies and tax breaks.

Americans might like to think otherwise, but the reality is the free market is a myth. Wall Street and farmers and oil companies and dozens of other industries and special interest groups with the political clout to finagle juicy subsidies and cozy tax-breaks from their patrons in Washington — Republican and Democrat alike — certainly don’t play by free market rules. Karl Rove, an obviously intelligent man, knows this and probably couldn’t care less. To Rove, Detroit’s just a soft target for some cheap political point scoring.

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